Standing out in an Android crowd

You would have to be a little crazy to buy any Android tablet right now, for two reasons.

John Davidson

The Xoom 2: slim, but not too slim; and light, but not the lightest tablet tested. The Xoom 2 does have nicer looking icons. But is that enough to set it apart?

Hello, and welcome to another instalment of our regular weekly column, “If it’s Tuesday, it must be time for another Android Tablet Of The Week”.

This week’s Android Tablet Of The Week (ATOTW) comes to us courtesy of Motorola, and it’s different from our last ATOTW, the Toshiba AT200, because . . . because . . . because this is now, and last week was a whole week ago. I mean, you wouldn’t buy a carton of milk that was a week out of date, would you? Would you? No, I didn’t think so.

Then again, would you buy a fresh carton of milk today if you knew there was an even fresher carton of delicious chocolate-flavoured milk coming out tomorrow? Or if not tomorrow, then perhaps on March 7, little over a week from tomorrow?

You know the chocolate milk I’m talking about, don’t you? That’s right, it’s the Apple iPad 3, which may or may not exist, which may or may not be more delicious than this week’s ATOTW, and which may or may not be released next week.

Though, with so much uncertainty surrounding the iPad 3, can you afford to wait for it? Can you afford to not snaffle up this week’s ATOTW?

Well the answers to those last two questions are, in reverse order, yes and yes. Indeed, you would have to be a little crazy to buy any Android tablet right now, for two reasons: you should wait to see what Apple does with its expected iPad launch; and even if you don’t like the new iPad (if it exists), you still won’t have missed anything by waiting a week or two. This week’s ATOTW will still be there, waiting on the shelves for you, and in all likelihood an even newer, fresher ATOTW will have come along in the meantime. And by “fresher”, I mean a tablet not just made of fresh metaphorical milk, but a tablet made of actual ice cream.

You see, this week’s ATOTW, the Motorola Xoom 2, might be brand new, but one of its core ingredients is already stale: its operating system. The same is true of every other ATOTW except the brilliant Asus Transformer Prime: they all have an out-of-date and not-particularly-good-for-tablets version of Android.

The freshest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich – now mercifully known simply as ICS – has been bouncing around for months now, but the Xoom 2 comes with an older version of Android, known as Honeycomb, and merely the promise of an ICS upgrade to come at some unspecified date. It makes it hard to form a proper view on the tablet, because it’s hard to tell how well ICS will run on it. Likely it will run fine, if not as fast as the Transformer Prime, which has four processing cores rather than the Xoom 2’s two cores, and which blew away all-comers in our benchmarking tests.

So if it doesn’t bring the latest software or the fastest speeds to the table, what does our ATOTW offer?

The Xoom 2 is a well-rounded machine, both in the sense that its sharp corners have literally been cut off, and in the sense that it’s pretty good at everything, without being particularly great at anything.

Its battery life, 10 hours 37 minutes of continuous video play in our tests, is solid without being miraculous. (The Galaxy Tab 7.7 lasts more than 15 hours in the same test.) Its speed is above average but would never win a prize. Its price is above average, too, but that’s because it comes with a mobile broadband connection, and indeed once you take that into account it turns out it’s a full $110 cheaper than an iPad 2 with a slower mobile broadband connection, a smaller screen and generally fewer features than the Xoom 2. This week’s ATOTW is slim, too (8.8 mm), without being the worrying slim like our last ATOTW, the Toshiba AT200, which is so slim (7.7 mm) it flexes. At 603 grams our ATOTW is a shade lighter than the equivalent iPad, but heavier than most of our past ATOTW winners.

And if by all of this you’re getting the impression that the Xoom 2 does little to set itself apart from the pack, then good. That’s the impression it gave us in the four days we had to test it. Its icons are a little nicer than your normal Android Honeycomb icons, but ho hum. It comes with a couple of nice business apps, including Citrix Receiver, GoToMeeting and Fuze Meeting, but they’re free apps anyway and easy to install on our other ATOTWs.

What the Xoom 2 does come with however come is an excellent range of onscreen keyboards, including Swype (our favourite), SwiftKey Tablet X (saving you $3.99 from the Android store) and a handwriting recognition keyboard replacement known as MyScript Stylus. The Australian version of the Xoom 2 doesn’t come with the special stylus needed to use that last one, however, so we couldn’t test it. Which is the story of this week’s ATOTW. You really need to wait for ICS to come out to test it properly, and by then the iPad 3 might well be out, and who knows what else might have happened. Another dozen or so Android tablets might be on the shelves. They might stay there, too.

BY John Davidson

John Davidson is the award-winning sketch writer in charge
of Australia's pre-eminent (but sadly fictitious) Digital Life
Laboratories. A former computer programmer, documentary maker and
foreign correspondent, John now reviews all the gadgets he can ill
afford to own.

BY John Davidson

John Davidson is the award-winning sketch writer in charge
of Australia's pre-eminent (but sadly fictitious) Digital Life
Laboratories. A former computer programmer, documentary maker and
foreign correspondent, John now reviews all the gadgets he can ill
afford to own.